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RICHARD POIRIER
which do not refer to life so much as to myth, are subtly trans–
formed into history, reified by being shifted from the context of
an allegory into the context of social and economic critique:
The religious revolution of the age came on a world heavy
with the vastest economic crisis that Europe had experienced
since the fall of Rome. Art and scientific curiosity and tech–
nical skill, learning and statesmanship, the scholarship which
explored the past and the prophetic vision which pierced the
future, had all poured their treasures into the sumptuous
shrine of the new civilization. Behind the genii of beauty and
wisdom who were its architects there moved a murky, but
indispensable figure.
It
was the demon whom Dante had met
muttering gibberish in the fourth circle of the Inferno, and
whom Sir Guyon was to encounter three centuries later,
tanned with smoke and seared with fire, in a cave adjoining
the mouth of hell. His uncouth labours quarried the stones
which Michael Angelo was to raise, and sank deep in the
Roman clay the foundations of the walls to be adorned by
Raphael.
For it was the mastery of man over his environment which
heralded the dawn of the new age, and it was in the stress of
expanding economic energies that this mastery was proved
and won. Like sovereignty in a feudal society, the economic
efforts of the Middle Ages, except in a few favoured spots,
had been fragmentary and decentralized. Now the scattered
raiders were to be organized and disciplined; the dispersed
and irregular skirmishes were to be merged in a grand strug–
gle, on a front which stretched from the Baltic to the Ganges
and from the Spice Islands to Peru. Every year brought news
of fresh triumphs. The general who marshalled the host and
launched the attack was economic power.
With his customary eloquence, that special blend of elegiac
yearning and foreboding, that gives way to theatrical excitement in
a new and terrifying world of force, Tawney's style here and else–
where catches some of the complications of feeling that ideally
attend any serious thought about the paradoxes of progress. The
aesthetics at work in the passage is of a kind that usually informs
the radical critique of progress. What I want to suggest by the
examples of Tawney and Spenser is that a good deal of contem–
porary radical thinking derives from an ancient tradition, both
